Last Call For Analog!
Twas the night before the analog shutoff,
and all through the house,
not a creature was stirring,
except Dad; scanning and tweaking his hot-dang antenna!
Ready or not, I’m throwing the switch at 12:30 PM tomorrow afternoon. Tonight’s phone bank callers were getting a little desperate and feeling overwhelmed with hooking up converter boxes.
I invited my buddy Fred Pace, Director of Engineering for the Clear Channel radio stations in Raleigh. Fred was a great help on the phones tonight, even though he’s a radio guy by trade. We had a good time and talked about HD radio, and how FM stations are now broadcasting sub-channels in digital. The system they use keeps the analog signal while adding the new digital channels that can received with new digital radios. We can’t quite figure out why it’s called HD radio, but it’s some really cool technology. I hope to post video from our conversations if I remembered to hit record on the camcorder. (Us TV folks get a little flustered easily)
I sort of envy the radio guys, because if they want to go live, all they need is a phone. In TV, we have to setup bi-directional communication links, color balance the cameras, light the scene, test the audio and usually feed in footage to use while we’re talking. My hat has always been tipped to our Photographers that do this everyday. It’s a demanding job, and they do it in all kinds of conditions.
I let Fred see our HD bitstream data rate, and he drooled over the bandwidth it takes to send Dolby AC-3 digital audio. HD radio uses 96 thousand bits per second, while Dolby 5.1 audio uses 384 thousand bits per second. That’s a lot of data and just a drop in the bucket compared to what we transmit, and your box has to receive and decode.
The whole world is going digital crazy these days, and as long as your antenna is up to the challenge, you’ll love the results. This is an exciting time we live in, and someday we’ll look back at all this and wonder how we put up with fuzzy pictures and bad audio for so long.
Watch me throw the analog switch on NBC 17 live, and on our website at www.mync.com at 12:30!
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That’s cool that we can watch you live!! Good Luck Russell! Miss ya!